Russia wants crypto folded into its anti-money-laundering machine

Russia's Investigative Committee wants cryptocurrency formally baked into the country's anti-money-laundering machinery, a move it says would sharpen the state's ability to trace digital transactions and build criminal cases. The proposal went on the table in Vienna during the 20th session of the Open-ended Intergovernmental Working Group on Asset Recovery, according to a Nov. 6 TASS report.

Anna Starzhinskaya, who heads a department at the committee's Main Investigative Directorate, carried the pitch for the agency. The working group sits under the Conference of States Parties to the UN Convention against Corruption and focuses on cross-border cooperation in finding, recovering and returning criminal assets.

Russia's investigators already lean on Rosfinmonitoring, the country's financial intelligence agency, to sift through crypto transactions and pull out evidence. The committee said that access to those specialized resources lets authorities track coin movements and gather material to prove criminal activity. It now wants crypto assets written into the AML framework itself — though nobody said when that would happen.

Starzhinskaya paired the crypto ask with a scoreboard on corruption seizures. Working with operational services, financial intelligence units and regulators, investigators identified and seized property tied to corruption cases worth more than $486 million in 2026. They fired off roughly 2,500 requests to Rosfinmonitoring in connection with criminal cases over the year, information that helped locate assets later frozen or confiscated in court.

She also pushed for countries to swap information and provide mutual legal assistance when assets cross borders, calling for those mechanisms to run free of political considerations, on the basis of equality, mutual respect and reciprocity. Over the past four years, the committee says it has arranged the execution of more than 6,000 legal assistance requests spanning different categories of criminal cases.

The proposal rides on a year of tightening rules. Russia's comprehensive crypto framework kicked in Sept. 1, opening regulated trading, custody and some cross-border settlements under Bank of Russia supervision, with separate requirements for qualified and nonqualified investors and annual purchase caps plus mandatory assessments for retail buyers. In October the central bank registered its first operators — four exchange operators and five digital custodians — with Sberbank and VTB among the admitted institutions. Rosfinmonitoring, meanwhile, began requiring taxpayer identification numbers from customers opening accounts with digital depositories in September, and transfers above 60,000 rubles must come with detailed payer and recipient data. The Bank of Russia blacklisted 2,600 crypto wallets in August after spotting over 1 billion rubles flowing in during the first half of 2026, and says crypto was used to pull in funds in more than 74% of the financial pyramid schemes it flagged.